Thursday, May 11, 2006

Boyles Continues Orbiting Earth; No Sign of Return

There's a classic scene in the film Good Will Hunting, where the main character stands under arraignment for assault. It's not his first time before the judge by any means, and Will is ready with a bamboozling array of arcane precedents:

There is a lengthy legal precedent, Your Honor, going back to 1789, whereby a defendent may claim self-defense against an agent of the government where the act is shown to be a defense against tyranny, a defense of liberty... Henry Ward Beecher proclaimed, in his Proverbs From Plymouth Pulpit back in 1887, that "Every American citizen is by birth, a sworn officer of the state. Every man is a policeman." As for the other officers, even William Congrave said; "he that first cries out 'stop thief' is 'oft he that has stolen the treasure...." Liberty, in case you've forgotten, is "the soul's right to breathe, and when it cannot take a long breath laws are girded too tight. Without liberty, man is a syncope." (beat, to Judge)Ibid. Your Honor.

Of course, Damon and Affleck wrote Will to be whip-smart, once-in-a-century smart. Would that poor Emilie Boyles had such clever people working on her behalf, either as screenwriters or legal advisors. I guess that's what you get when you troll the internet for free legal help.

As regular readers know, Boyles has had her public financing revoked and is subject to steep fines, but is contesting her violations with the City. The judgements came down in two separate parts, and yesterday Boyles filed the documentation to request a hearing for the second part, which comprised four violations and $4,000 in fines. On the form is space to elucidate the reasons for requesting a hearing, and if they are the angles she's going to go with, I sure hope the hearing is public and they serve snacks.

Unfortunately I'm unable to crack into Adobe and pull out the full text for you to read here, but I'll transcribe a couple of highlights. On paying Vladimir Golovan, she refers to him as "defective product," and turns her neat trick of blaming Erik Sten for everything:

...it would...stand to reason that any instance instance [sic] of defective product by City funds would need result [sic] in a fine of the Contract signor...for example, the city-funded out of state attorneys retained by Commissioner Sten for the failed Enron attempt or the Water Bureau systems retained by Commissioner Sten, or even the purchase of a defective stapler by a city-funded candidate should result in the Auditor holding the Commissior [sic] personally fiscally responsible.

There's definitely a defect here somewhere, but it's not with the stapler. As regards the use of campaign funds to pay the phone bill in her residence, Boyles' excuse is that there was nowhere else to put a "campaign phone" but her house, since she had no campaign HQ yet. Under this theory, why didn't she just use her funds to build a campaign HQ addition onto her trailer?

For the allegation that she entered into contracts pledging to use campaign money for work done before she was awarded the money, Boyles cryptically says she "disagrees with the Auditor's assessment" and will bring evidence with her to the hearing. Similarly, she asserts that payments for her daughter's work on the campaign met standards for market value "as determined by the State of Oregon," without actually saying how. And speaking of her daughter's work, she rips into Gary Blackmer, Portland's Auditor, for making statements to the Oregonian that "indicate a pre-meditated bias and prejudice contradictory to the EEO policy of the city which prohibits age discrimination." I doubt she'll gain any relief on that point, but if there's one area where she might have a case it's that one--it was indeed pretty dumb of Blackmer to tell The O before completing his review, that he didn't think her daughter was earning her keep. The rest of her apologia for Kimberly Boyles is pretty priceless, however:

The work of Ms. K Boyles provided important information into many organizations throughout the Portland area including Peak Oil organizations, Food Security contacts and others [sic] organizations with whom this campaign was gaining momentum until the time in which the Auditor's office paralyzed this campaign. Additionally, there appears to be a lack of understanding of the emerging industry of electronic intelligence by the Auditor's office and the application of the information gained through the application of such intellectual property and electronic intelligence.